"In converting the heathen," I told Penelope, "never make the mistake of converting your friends. There is nothing so unconquerable as the immortal grudge that your friend owes you for having had the impertinence to interfere with his opinions. You see, friendship, being a rare and elusive and provoking condition of the soul, has nothing to do with opinions. It matters what your casual acquaintance thinks about the subject of the hour, because you have to talk with him. It doesn't matter in the least what your friend thinks, because there is no conversation among friends, there is only intercourse, which has nothing to do with opinions. Naturally, I am not talking of eternal truths, because if your friend does not see eye to eye with you about those, no friendship is possible. One never converts people to eternal truths, only to the particular manifestation of these that is being revealed to the age through which we are passing."
"According to that," objected Penelope, "there is no possibility of converting people to anything,unless they are already converted without knowing it."
"Exactly," I said. "That is why it is waste of time as well as impertinence to convert the person who is your friend. And as your mother is one of the few mothers I know who is also a friend to her children, I strongly advise you not to——"
"That is all very well," again objected Penelope; "but mother has not yet discovered that she is converted to the particular manifestation of eternal truth known as Votes for Women; and, to put it plainly, you can't go on living with some one who thinks all suffragists are hooligans, when you are one of the hooligans."
"Theoretically," I argued, "you could, if——"
"But I don't live with mother theoretically," interrupted Penelope; "and if you seriously mean that you cannot convert her because of the immortal grudge she would owe you for doing it, I suppose I shall have to take that risk myself. It is not at all easy to convert an old lady to eternal truth at the mouth of an ear-trumpet," she added insinuatingly.
In the end I was persuaded to undertake the conversion, being no wiser than other apostles of great movements who have bartered friendships for causes since the world began; and Sarah's greeting, when she opened the door to me the day I called upon Penelope's mother by appointment, was therefore disconcerting.
"Miss Penelope said, would you please wait in the back drawing-room till she's finished converting the mistress," said Sarah in the impassive toneof one whom no message, however strange, could disconcert. "It's the Suffragettics, I think," she added for my enlightenment. To Sarah all manifestations of the eternal truths rest on the level of rheumatics and other mortal infirmities.
I suggested that, folding-doors not being soundproof, I had better wait downstairs. Sarah led the way up to the back drawing-room without giving this proposal a moment's serious consideration.
"You can hear anything that's said to the mistress from the top of the house to the bottom—that is, if the mistress can hear it," she explained unemotionally.
The controversy had reached the acute stage when I arrived in the back drawing-room, an unwilling eavesdropper. This I gathered from the significant circumstance that both speakers were talking at once. Presently there came a calm, in the course of which Penelope seemed to be getting on rather well. She was keeping her temper wonderfully, I thought, and was apparently convincing the enemy beyond the power of retort. The absence of retort became, indeed, astonishing, until it was explained by a sudden interruption from Penelope's mother, just as her daughter reached a fine pitch of persuasive eloquence.
"I can't hear a word you are saying, my dear. I wish you would pick up my ear-trumpet," said Penelope's mother, breaking unconsciously into the middle of a sentence.
Evidently the ear-trumpet was found and adjusted, for retorts came thick and fast as soonas Penelope began patiently to say it all over again.
"What rubbish, child!" was an early interruption. "I have never done anything to hinder your development, as you call it. I drew the line at ju-jitsu, I admit, because I didn't like the appearance of the unpleasant little yellow person with the pigtail—he had no pigtail? Well, he was the style of person to whom one expects to find a pigtail attached. That is neither here nor there—"
"No, mother darling, it isn't," interposed Penelope firmly; "and I never said you hindered my development. We are not Suffragettes because we have personal grievances, but because of the general attitude towards women——"
"You will never persuade me, my dear, that you can cure anybody's attitude towards women by knocking off policemen's helmets——"
"We don't knock off——"
"I am convinced, Penelope, that I have seen a picture, in theDaily Illustrated, I think it was, of a woman knocking off a policeman's helmet. Her mouth was wide open, and she was doing it with an umbrella—a dreadful, ill-bred, unwomanly creature she looked! I remember it distinctly. TheDaily Illustratedis a most respectable paper; it would never——"
"Darling, you know you have told me over and over again how all the respectable papers of the day called Florence Nightingale a dreadful, unwomanly creature for wanting to go out to the war to nurse grown-up men without a chaperon, insteadof staying at home to nurse the baby she hadn't got," shouted Penelope down the ear-trumpet.
"And so they did," cried her mother, as though her veracity were being called in question. "All sorts of wicked and untrue things were said about that noble woman, for whom I have the utmost veneration, because she taught me to air a room by opening the window a few minutes at the bottom instead of opening the door. Oh! it was shocking the things they said about her! But now——"
"Now," said the wily Penelope, "no woman in England is more honoured. That shows, doesn't it, that we should not believe everything the papers——"
"Penelope," said her mother abruptly, "I have dropped my ear-trumpet again, so you had better ring the bell for tea."
Signs of the fray were still evident when Sarah admitted me to the front drawing-room. The ear-trumpet was sticking out of the coal-box, always a sign of mental disturbance in Penelope's home; and both she and her mother were looking for the spectacles which had been swept momentarily out of existence.
"I cannot think what I did with them," complained Penelope's mother, as though her loss were not an hourly occurrence. "If you had not upset me so dreadfully, Penelope——"
Then she looked up and saw me, Sarah's lusty announcement of my name having passed over her unheeded through the temporary disablement of the ear-trumpet. With a royal gesture of her handshe banished eternal truths and their tiresome topical manifestations to oblivion, and received me in the grand manner that was designed, fifty years ago, to hide from visitors and servants alike that the head of the house ever had any private emotions or any public interests. Now, as then, it deceived nobody; but it bridged the gulf between eternal truths and afternoon tea very pleasantly.
"How charming of you to look in just as Penelope and I were going to have tea! Come and sit near me," was the gracious greeting I received. She turned a serene countenance towards Penelope, who was showing no inherited instinct for bridging impassable gulfs. "My dear, can you find my ear-trumpet? I am sure I had it a moment ago."
"You had," murmured the rebellious Penelope. "It might just as well have stayed in the coal-box the whole time, for all the good it was to either of us!"
It was only when, at the conclusion of a blameless discourse on ribbon embroidery, Penelope had been sent upstairs to look for a piece of needle-work, that Penelope's mother stopped being my Early Victorian hostess and became the mother of all the ages.
"I suppose," she said, with the true motherly mixture of appeal and disapproval in her tone, "it is you who have converted Penelope to all this nonsense."
"No," I said. "The age has converted her. Penelope is the child of the age."
"She has no business to be anybody's child buther mother's," was the indignant reply. "When I was a girl daughters were their mother's own children——"
I interrupted to ask if she really thought that this had ever been true. The ear-trumpet described furious circles in the air—another danger signal, as I knew from experience.
"When I was a girl," said Penelope's mother once more, "we had the good manners not to let our mothers guess that we knew more than they did—even if we did."
I asked a depressed Penelope, on the way downstairs, why she had not taken my advice and left me to risk my friendship with her mother, instead of imperilling her own?
"It was idiotic of me," confessed Penelope; "she said something unfair about 'those dreadful women,' so I had to say I was one of them; and after that I had to go on, naturally. But if I haven't converted mother in the drawing-room, I seem to have succeeded incidentally in converting cook in the kitchen. It's a pity there were not a few more Antis concealed about the house while I was at the ear-trumpet, isn't it?"
"Listen!" I interrupted.
Sarah was clearing away tea, and through the open drawing-room door came scraps of conversation.
"It is only right to study both sides of a question, Sarah."
"Yes'm."
"Florence Nightingale, the noblest Englishwomanwho ever lived—I hope you open the window and not the door, when you wish to air your bedroom, Sarah?—Florence Nightingale was misrepresented just in the same way."
"Yes'm."
"I think I shall stop your monthly magazine and order a suffrage periodical for the kitchen instead."
"Yes'm. We have two of Miss Penelope's already. Thank you, ma'am."
Penelope and I fled downstairs to escape detection.
"She was converted all the time; I told you she would be," I remarked on the doorstep.
"Now for the immortal grudge!" sighed Penelope.
"People of London!" faltered the lady who had just stepped upon the sugar-box at the edge of the pavement.
The people of London, who happened just then to be a very little girl carrying a very large baby, stared in some astonishment. Another lady, who had been distributing handbills farther along the street, came back and prompted the speaker encouragingly.
"Go on; that's splendid!" she said with friendly warmth.
The woman on the sugar-box, who had never stood on a sugar-box before, smiled wanly. "Why do they never have earthquakes except in countries where people don't want them?" she sighed. Her friend being engaged at the moment in pressing a handbill upon the little girl, who obligingly gripped the baby with one hand and her chin in order to take it, there came no response to the appeal of the orator in the gutter; and she pulled herself together and made a fresh start.
"People of London!" she repeated amiably."We have come here to tell you about 'Votes for——'"
"Why, it's these 'ere Suffragites!" suddenly yelled the people of London, shifting the baby on to the other arm; and the debutante on the sugar-box broke down and laughed deprecatingly.
"I really must wait for some more people," she protested.
"You needn't," said her more experienced companion. "They always come along fast enough as soon as they see some one like you standing on a sugar-box."
"That doesn't surprise me," remarked the inexperienced one, thinking regretfully of a happy past in which the chief aim of a well-ordered life had been to avoid doing anything that would attract attention.
"Here they come," continued the lady with the handbills. "Just keep them going while I get rid of these, there's a dear! It doesn't matter what you say," she added consolingly, as she went towards two approaching women with outstretched hand and an ingratiating smile.
"Ah! ce sont les suffragettes!" exclaimed one of these unexpectedly. "Nous sommes des suffragistes françaises, nous aussi! Vive le féminisme!"
"Oh, how perfectly delightful!" said the English suffragist, beaming on them. "Do stop and listen.Nous allons avoir un—oh, bother! What is 'meeting'?—un rendez-vous, mesdames!"
"Tiens!" gasped the French suffragists, as well they might.
At this moment the speaker, her mind a blank concerning all the carefully prepared sentences she had been learning by heart for days, could be heard announcing that she would now call upon the other lady to address the meeting; and the crowd, increasing every minute, cheered inconsequently.
"Well, there ain't much of her, but give 'er a chaunce!" remarked a wit, as the second speaker mounted the sugar-box.
A small boy hitched up his trousers and moved off. "I shall turn into a woman if I stay here," he observed.
"No such luck for you, my boy!" came the quick retort from the rickety platform, and the impressionable crowd grinned with appreciation.
The speaker pounced upon her opportunity and began to sketch the history of Reform. She used long words purposely, so they made an instant show of listening, it being out of the question, of course, to allow that any woman, least of all a Suffragette, could talk over their heads. The astonishing statement that women in the past had enjoyed a certain measure of political power, was, however, too much for one youth.
"Where did you git that from?" he shouted.
"My friend has forgotten his history," said the speaker indulgently. "It is an historical fact——"
The interrupter turned his back contemptuously on the sugar-box, and addressed the audience in a loud and overpowering voice.
"Look at 'er!" he adjured them, jerking his thumb over his shoulder. "History, she says! Believin' what she's towld in a book. Ain't that jest like a woman?"
Having thus disposed of the facts of history, he went on to deal more largely with the question as a whole. "Pack o' women!" he snorted. "Why don't they stay at 'ome and mind the baby? Why don't they cook the old man's dinner? Why don't they——?"
"This gentleman evidently thinks it is question time," struck in the real speaker with undisturbed composure. "Perhaps, when he reaches the age that will entitle him to use a vote, he will know more about the procedure of a political meeting——"
"Well, you ain't got a vote yourself, anyhow!" said the incensed youth, turning round amid the laughter of the crowd to face the woman on the sugar-box, which, of course, was exactly what she wanted him to do.
"Ah, I was wrong," she smiled back at him. "I see you do know something about the present political situation. If you will kindly keep your questions till I have finished speaking, I shall be very happy to——"
"Yuss!" agreed a supporter. "Stow it, Jim, till the lidy's had 'er say."
"But I don't want to hear no bloomin' Suffragette," grumbled the youth, angrily conscious that the crowd was no longer with him.
"Then git out!" advised the crowd; and thespeaker's voice was drowned for a minute or so in the altercation that followed.
"What's it all about?" asked one woman of another, at the edge of the crowd.
The other, encircling a large bundle with her arms, shook her head.
"I dunno," she said; "but I loves to 'ear 'em talk."
The woman on the sugar-box was just giving the obvious reply to another interrupter, who wanted to know how a woman could find time to vote if she had a husband and six children to look after.
"How does a man find time to vote, if he has a wife and six children to support?" she demanded; and the woman with the bundle nodded approvingly.
"Now she's talkin' sense, and I likes sense," she remarked to her companion. "I don't 'old with women bein' Prime Ministers, but I likes sense."
The hostile youth, growing tired of being made the sport of the crowd, moved off with the remark that he would like "to see 'em all drowned"; and the speaker profited by a temporary lull and began to talk of economics. She held her audience now without difficulty, telling them things about the labour market that they knew to be true; and a kind of tense hush was over the crowd round the sugar-box, when a well-dressed woman came strolling along the pavement on her way home from the Park.
"Why, I do believe that is a real live Suffragette! How chic!" she exclaimed with an amused smile.
The Suffragette caught the remark, and determined to catch the woman who made it. In a minute or two the amused smile was gone, and another comment floated up to the sugar-box.
"Jack, are you there? You must come and listen to this—you positively must! I—I had no idea they were like that!"
The woman in the French hat was won, but the crowd was again temporarily lost, and wild din reigned for the next few moments while supporters yelled for silence and opponents sang songs. At the first semblance of a pause, the Suffragette broke in again, the smile still predominating.
"I can see how anxious you are to help the Suffragettes," she said sweetly; and once more she carried the joking, irresponsible crowd along with her. "You women who are here, come to our demonstration in Hyde Park next Sunday——"
"Hold on, young woman, who's going to cook the Sunday dinner for the kids?" interposed a voice.
"Your wife will cook it before she starts," was the ready rejoinder. "Or, better still, she can cook it overnight, and you can bring it with you and eat it in the Park——"
"What price roast pork and greens in Hyde Park?" demanded a sporting-looking gentleman in a terrific waistcoat.
"It won't hurt you to have cold pork and salad just for once," said the resourceful speaker. "Onlythink how the children will love a picnic, and a picnic like ours, too, with eighty women-speakers at the end of it! You know how dull picnics generally are when there is nothing more to eat——"
"Eighty of 'em! How about Holloway?" jeered the man in the waistcoat.
She turned on him swiftly. "If you had your vote taken from you to-morrow, wouldn't you have the pluck to go to prison to get it back?" she asked, suddenly in deadly earnest.
Any crowd loves a fighter, and this one howled with delight. The lady in the French hat noticed that listening women, who had hitherto shown no open approval of what was said, nodded furtively and caught their breath when the speaker fired up in defence of women.
"Why, they go to prison because they like it, don't they?" observed the amused man who answered to the name of Jack. He had not intended this for an audible interruption, but nothing escaped the ear of the woman on the sugar-box.
"If you think a woman's ordinary life outside prison is as dreary as all that, don't you think it's time you gave her the power to improve her conditions, so that she needn't go to Holloway for a pleasant change?" she shot back at him, hot with scorn; and again listening women flushed with nervous pleasure. "Some of our comrades are coming out of prison next Saturday," the speaker went on rapidly; "and if you want to give them a welcome, as I know you do"—here she paused to allow time for yells of derision and references toskilly—"come and walk in our procession from Holloway gates."
"What! And be taken for gaol-birds too? Not much!" roared the man of sporting appearance.
"We'll come, miss; we'll be there!" suddenly called the woman with the bundle; and curiously enough, the crowd respected that and stopped jeering. But the speaker of a hundred open-air meetings, knowing her crowd better than it knew itself, saw that it had had enough, and called for questions. These were swiftly disposed of, being principally of the wash-tub order, already answered in her speech; and observing serenely that she concluded everybody was now converted, the Suffragette came down from her perch.
She and her companion were instantly swallowed up in the jostling, chattering crowd, and the well-dressed woman appealed to Jack.
"Do help them to get out of this," she said, clutching anxiously at his arm. "They'll be crushed to death, I know they will!"
"Eh, what? My dear girl, they're much better able to take care of themselves than I am," observed Jack tranquilly. "Besides, they're not being crushed to death. You couldn't crush a Suffragette if you tried."
A sudden swirl of the stream swept them face to face with the two suffragists, who, still distributing handbills to right and left of them as they came, were composedly wedging a way for themselves through the dispersing people.
"I—I think you're splendid; and so does Jack!"cried their new supporter, flinging mere accuracy to the winds. "And I'm coming to Holloway Gates on Saturday and to Hyde Park on Sunday—and so is Jack!"
"Eh what?" said Jack mildly.
Votes for Women, price one penny!
Articles by Annie Kenney,
Mrs. Lawrence, Christabel,
Other Suffragettes as well.
Men and women, come and buy—
As you pass and hear the cry—
Votes for Women!here we sell
Articles by Christabel,
Mrs. Lawrence, Annie Kenney—
Votes for Women, price one penny!
(New Street Cries, 1909.)
I never knew until I became a regular newspaper seller, one day in every week, how many people there are in the world bent on reforming it. You do not discover this so long as you merely sell papers in a spasmodic fashion, appearing on fine days at the edge of the pavement with a bundle ofVotes for Womenunder your arm, and going off to tea as soon as these are sold out. Any element of amateurishness at once adds an air of detachment to the paper seller and keeps the world from really making friends with her. But as soon as the public grasps that she is a fixture, just as much so as the seller of pink football news or of green politics, except that her stock is renewed by a purple, whiteand green pony trap instead of by a panting boy on a bicycle, then every kind of crank who is out for an airing thinks she is there to listen to his views on every conceivable subject, from food reform up to simplicitarianism.
You divide the world into three kinds of people, roughly speaking, when you sell papers as a professional and not as an amateur. There is the person who wants to buy a paper. There is the person who wants to know where the nearest tea-shop is, or which omnibus goes to the Circus, or whether you have seen any one with pink wings—the last being a reference to millinery and not to aviation. This person really makes one feel like a professional newsboy at a street corner. Lastly, there is the crank. The crank does not want to buy a paper, or to seek information; he merely wants to talk. He leaves the ordinary newsvendor in peace, recognizing that he is there merely for the purpose of selling news, whereas the seller of suffrage papers represents an attempt to reform the world as well. So her pitch becomes a common meeting-ground for cranks.
If it be true that the character of an age is to be found in the character of its cranks, the period we are passing through will present extraordinary difficulties to the chronicler of the future. That is the worst of living in an age when most of the big things have been established in theory, though some still remain to be established in fact. It was quite easy to be a crank with distinction when people tortured you for saying the world was round. Now, youhave to fall back on rational dress or Swedish exercises, or a whole host of minor movements to educate public opinion, and the real crank has a hard struggle for existence. Personally, standing as I believe for one of the few big things that still have to be fought for because they are not yet established in fact, I have always felt inclined to look upon these lesser attempts to improve humanity as fads. But I find from standing at the edge of the pavement that the hall-mark of every crank is a firm belief that all the other cranks are only faddists.
"No," said the tailor-made lady with firmness, as she prepared to pass on after reading my newsbill; "I have no time for fads. Before I married, when I earned my own living and paid rates and taxes and—and gas, I quite believed in this sort of thing. In fact, I never condemn any woman for wanting a vote."
She seemed to think that she deserved some praise for this evidence of self-restraint; and I said something inane about thinking of other people. She looked injured.
"Naturally, I do not mean that I lead an idle or a selfish life," she said. "Sport, that is my strong point—outdoor sport." I suppose she gathered that this did not quite fill my conception of human usefulness, for she added hastily—"And charity. Sport and charity—that is my life."
"You could indulge in both, selling our paper," I said. I concluded from the haste with which she went away that she did not agree with me.
"Ah!" said the elderly gentleman, who excusedhimself quite unnecessarily for buying a paper by explaining that it was for his wife, "who is quite foolish about your question,"—"the great mistake you ladies make is in not concentrating upon the educational test. You'd have thousands more on your side—myself, in fact—if you didn't want to flood the electorate with illiterate——"
An interruption occurred here, as the conductor of a waiting omnibus whistled to me for a paper and gave me his confidential opinion that we "were going to get it soon." The elderly gentleman turned triumphantly to the nearest newsboy.
"There! What did I say?" he demanded. "Socialists, every one of them! Socialists!"
The newsboy shrugged his shoulders as he looked after him, then turned and gave me a wink out of pure friendliness. "Chronic, ain't it?" he remarked.
Everything, by the way, is "chronic" to my companions in the paper-selling trade; and I have some difficulty in not letting the expression, whatever it may mean, creep into my vocabulary.
The temperance reformer was less easy to rout because he was so desperately in earnest. It was no use pointing out to him that we were both travelling along the same road, really. His was the one and only possible scheme for regenerating the world, and the women who actually wanted the power to help him were wilfully obstructing his path.
"Local option!" he repeated several times with enthusiasm, describing circles on the pavement with his umbrella and effectually keeping all possiblecustomers at a distance. "Local option! That's the ticket. Votes for women, indeed!"
I said mildly that I supposed the reform of the goose was always the fad of the gander, and was sorry to see that he appeared hurt. "Of course," I added hurriedly, "I admit that I am the goose." He still looked offended, but the remark happily put him to flight after he had spoilt the newspaper trade at our corner for nearly ten minutes.
The most determined instance of the crank who sees all the rest of the world as faddists, or worse, is, I think, the animal faddist. Of course, we all advocate kindness to animals: but that is different from being a faddist about it. Still, I admit I am a little prejudice in the matter, owing to my encounter with the old lady, the toy dog, and the Kindness-to-pet-animals Christmas card.
She arrived breathless on the kerb at my side, having been placed there by a policeman, while criticism of the toy dog rained plentifully from a brewer's dray, a bicycle, and a taxicab, all of which were mixed up in the road through their noble endeavours not to annihilate the yapping creature. I came into the situation because I unwound its chain, which had tied itself round the old lady's skirts, and placed the thing on her ermine muff. I received no acknowledgment of all this—first, because I picked him up by the head, seeing nothing else large enough to afford one a grip, and secondly, because she discovered I was a Suffragette.
"You ought to be locked up in a lunatic asylum," she said sternly.
For a moment I did not see the connection. Then I made allowances for her age and the peril she had just gone through and said—"Oh, no!" as soothingly as I could.
She put the dog with some difficulty inside her muff, tail first, which I felt was an indignity it scarcely deserved, even if it had dislocated the traffic. "When the world is full of tortured and suffering dumb animals!" she went on, glaring at the contents bill that fluttered from my hand.
I wished energetically that dumbness had been one of the disabilities of the particular tortured animal she was still trying to back into a hot ermine muff, for when I tried to say that my only objection to dumb animals was that they were never dumb, my remark was drowned in piercing yelps.
At the end of ten minutes I had learnt every detail of her private and special society for protecting pampered pets against those who pampered them—this, by the way, was not what she called it—and of the dear little children who paid their pennies weekly, and of the Christmas card to advertise the cause, that she had designed herself. The Christmas card was extricated from the ermine muff, with no inconsiderable ingenuity, for the toy dog, making a wild dash for liberty, very nearly emerged with it; and my criticism was condescendingly invited. It is not easy to give an intelligent opinion on a drawing of a cat, a dog, a donkey, a parrot, a tadpole, a pony, a pigeon, and a newt; and I found I had said quite the wrong thing when I murmured that it was very pretty. Prettiness, I was told sternly, was notits object. I looked again, and was fortunately inspired to detect that she had not included a rabbit. She thought she might squeeze in the rabbit between the Newfoundland dog and the newt; and after that I forced my own goods upon her in a determined manner until she went.
It is sometimes helpful to remind yourself, if you are the crank who stands at a street corner selling papers for a cause, that cranks are the salt of the earth. But, as Henry Harland once wrote in a frivolous moment—"Il faut souffrir pour être sel."
"I suppose we had better start," faltered the tall woman in purple.
"I can't think of a reasonable excuse for delaying any longer," sighed the girl in green.
"Come along!" said a third, making a great show of the courage she did not feel.
Nobody came along. Under some pretext or another we still lingered, though there were ten of us and the space in our Suffragette shop was uncomfortably limited. Most people, the even tenor of whose lives had not been ruffled by the call of a great cause, might have thought the day an unpropitious one to choose for patrolling the gutter, even for the sake of advertising a meeting of rebel women in the Albert Hall. A strong south-west wind, a real London drizzle overhead and thick mud underfoot, could hardly be held to offer striking attractions to a band of naturally timorous ladies, girt about with sandwich-boards, preparing to issue forth in procession into the conventional streets of Kensington. If we had been less timorous we should probably have postponed the expedition; but the last fearthat rebel women ever learn to overcome is the fear of being thought afraid, so this was an alternative that did not suggest itself to anybody.
"I never realized before what it meant to be a belted knight, but I do now," remarked our literary member, trying in vain to free her hands from their cardboard bonds in order to straighten a crooked hat. "If anything or anybody were to unhorse us and make us bite the dust—isn't that what belted knights were always doing to one another in the Middle Ages?—we should have to lie on our backs, as they did, till some one came and picked us up."
"I feel like a pantomime super, myself," observed somebody else, twirling round in order to get a full-length back view of herself in the glass. "I shall never get accustomed to the make-up," she added ruefully, as she once more swept the greater part of our stock of pamphlets from the counter to the floor, and had to stand helpless and repentant while the shop secretary picked them up, not for the first time in the course of these trial manœuvres.
"If you don't start soon, there will be nothing saleable left in the place," said the shop secretary pointedly.
"Well, what are you waiting for?" demanded the girl in green, trying to infuse a little real impatience into her tone.
"Courage," confessed the woman in purple, gloomily.
"Oh, nonsense!" said our literary member,without, however, moving any nearer to the door. "Think of George Herbert:
God gave thy soul brave wings; put not those feathers
Into a bed to sleep out all ill weathers."
We all tried to think of George Herbert, but without marked success.
"I can't think of anything but the ill weather waiting for us outside and all the people I know in Kensington," said the tall woman, voicing bluntly and concisely what the rest of us were feeling.
"Do you think the people we know would ever recognize us in these things?" asked some one in a moment of real inspiration; and under the influence of this new and cheering suggestion we formed up hastily in single file and really made a start.
The secretary of another local branch, who had dropped in to seek recruits for a similar poster parade in her district, observed significantly as we filed past her that it was most important to be as well dressed as possible in her neighbourhood. Neither this, nor the first comment that reached our ears as we plunged into the street, added particularly to our good opinion of ourselves.
"Well, I must say you ladies don't think of appearances, that you don't!" was the comment of the street. At a less sensitive moment we might have derived comfort from the tone of admiration in which this was uttered. As it was, an outrageous remark that followed did far more to raise our drooping spirits. This one was made by a girl, wearing a flaming hat and blouse that not one of us wouldhave had the courage to put on before going for a walk, even if supported by so magnificent a youth as the one on whose arm she leaned as she criticized.
"Brazen, ain't they?" she said.
After that, it was easy to laugh and go ahead in a world that could always be counted upon to feed the most unsatisfied sense of humour. Otherwise, for the first half-hour or so, I doubt if we should have felt acutely conscious of anything but the traffic. Glorious as it may seem to the imaginative to suffer for a cause, one finds it difficult, when carrying sandwich-boards in its service, to detach from this distant and problematic reward the more immediate prospect of being run down from behind by a skidding motor-omnibus. In time, no doubt, it would be possible to acquire the easy swagger of the real sandwich man, though the real sandwich man would under no circumstances be submitted, as we were, to a definite onslaught from every impudent tradesman's boy who whizzed past us on a tricycle. As it was, no one could have said that our pace bore the slightest resemblance to the leisurely saunter of the professional patroller of the gutter. In spite of conscientious efforts on our part to maintain the regulation distance from one another, none of us could resist the impulse to catch up the next woman in front; and as our leader, the tall woman in purple, desired nothing more than to cover the prescribed route and return to the shelter of home as quickly as possible, only he who ran could have read the announcement printed on our boards, as we raced breathlessly along the edge of the pavement.At the same time, we found, nobody had the slightest difficulty in reading the identity of those who carried the boards.
"Suffer-a-gettes! Look at 'em!" roared an omnibus driver.
"Well, why not?" responded a gallant cabman from the shelter we were approaching. "Why shouldn't Mrs. Pank'urst 'ave a vote, same as you an' me? Ain't she got as much sense in her 'ead as whatI'ave?" He modulated his belligerent shout to a dulcet undertone as we came alongside. "The whole of the four-wheel trade is with you, ladies," he told us confidentially.
A block in the traffic caused us all to close up for a moment, and we compared notes hurriedly.
"Not so bad as we expected, is it?" said our literary comrade, who was one of those to overhear the friendly remark made by the representative of the four-wheel trade.
The girl in green reserved her opinion. "It makes one feel desperately sorry for the poor men who have to do this sort of thing, not for a cause, but for a living," she said feelingly.
The girl in green was by nature sentimental. Having once sold a suffrage paper in the street for half a day, she found herself incapable ever afterwards of resisting the appeal of the street hawker, with the result that her flat became a depôt for patent toasting-forks, bone collar-studs, and quivering, iridescent beetles. Her latest conviction that a human link existed between her and all sandwich-men received, however, a slight shock as soon as weencountered one of these. Melting with compassion, she tried in a single look to express all she felt for his hard lot, but was met by a still more eloquent expression of pity from his eye—the one that did not wink—and became henceforth a little dubious about that particular human link. We tried, but without much success, to rekindle her faith in human links generally, by pointing out that his scorn was probably aroused by the unprofessional appearance of her sandwich boards, one of which was slipping its ribbon moorings as she went by.
Perhaps the most startling conversion we made in the course of our parade was that of the baby. Up to that moment it had been a plain and placid, contented baby, banging its Teddy bear happily against the side of the perambulator. When it saw our procession coming along, with flying colours and flapping boards, it dropped the Teddy bear on the pavement and emitted an amazing remark that sounded to all of us, except our literary member, like "Ga-ga-ga-ga-ga!" Our literary member, being imaginative, declared that what the baby really said was—"Hooray! Votes for Women!"—and the baby's nurse, who had to soil her white cotton gloves by picking the Teddy bear out of the mud, seemed inclined to agree with her.
"Them 'orrible Suffragettes!" she said crossly; and remembering the militant countenance of the baby we had converted, we felt bound to forgive her for feeling uneasy about the baby's future. Our triumph was short-lived, however, for we were scarcely out of hearing of the baby's gurgles when agentleman outside a public-house informed us, with some difficulty of utterance, that we were a disgrace to our sex.
"What do they mean, blocking up the King's 'Ighway, undreds and undreds of 'em?" he grumbled fiercely. As the girl in green observed, he was not in a condition when it would be fair to challenge his ability to count.
On the whole, the triumphs won as usual, and the insults were too funny and pathetic, both at once, to hurt much. There was the lady who told us very distinctly what she thought of us, and then dropped her skirts in the mud, a real feminine sacrifice, to take one of our handbills, because her hard heart was melted by the absent-minded smile of our literary member, who mistook her for a supporter. There was the clergyman who stood with his hat in his hand the whole time our procession was going by; there was the sentimentalist who, after telling each one of us in turn to go home and mind the baby, said in a tone of concentrated despair to the last of us—"What would you do if you had twins?" And, of course, there was the messenger-boy who stood just out of reach and yelled—"Want yer rights? Then you won't git 'em! Sooner give 'em to tomcats, I would!"
By the time we arrived in sight of home, even the woman in purple had become hardened to the perils and vicissitudes of the road and smiled quite easily at the postman who stood at the corner of the street. But when we found ourselves inside the shop, in full view of the shop looking-glass, it required all ournewly won insensibility to stifle an inward consciousness that the glories of a militant campaign still remained rather spiritual than actual. Our hair was damp and straight, our cardboard armour limp and bent; our skirts were caked with mud, and our boots strongly resembled those that one sometimes sees sticking out of river sand at low tide. For once, our literary comrade refrained from asking us to turn to George Herbert or anybody else for poetic consolation.
On the other hand, the postman's criticism became wildly, disproportionately cheering.
"Votes for women!" he shouted after us with a sneer, as we slowly passed indoors out of his sight. "Votes for a few rich women, that's all you're after!"
Under the circumstances, it was very pleasant to be mistaken for representatives of the rich and cultured classes.
I am inclined to think that the best general is he who never listens to warnings. Nobody, for instance, warned us not to hold a meeting in the Council Schools, where a number of apparently educated, if very young, gentlemen came to express their political opinions through the medium of motor-horns and chemical explosives. The warning would have made no difference, of course; the point is that it was never uttered. When, on the other hand, we announced that we meant to carry our election campaign into the black spot of the constituency, where a criminal population congregated thickly in a few mean streets, warnings came quick and fast. They were the normal warnings, telling how the police hesitated to penetrate there after dark, how it was never safe at any time of day for a woman to walk there alone, and so on, and so on. There is a black spot like that in most cities, and the same things, rightly or wrongly, are generally said about it. But when you are a pioneer, however humble a pioneer, you discover that the one person who may walk with safety in the heart of acriminal district is the rebel man or woman who is out fighting for a human cause.
No doubt, the elementary school child looks upon the Prime Minister who arranges for a general election to occur during the Christmas holidays as a sort of fairy godfather; but the pioneer, who hopes to advance her cause as a by-product of a Parliamentary election, would find the political situation considerably simplified by the elimination of the juvenile element. Anthropologists probably know all kinds of reasons why the young human creature always wants to throw things at what he cannot understand; and if I had to humanize the embryonic hooligan of our back streets, I believe I should begin by setting up a mysterious-looking target, a different one every day, in a prominent place, in order to gratify this elemental instinct at the least possible cost to the pioneer. Not having thought of this simple plan in time, however, those of us who first penetrated the black spot of our constituency on a canvassing expedition met with a good deal of concrete obstruction.
"I am used to banana skins," remarked one canvasser, on her return to the committee rooms; "I can even bear mud; and stones are never aimed with enough determination to matter much; but I should like to draw the line at red herrings. There is something so peculiarly atmospheric about red herrings."
"Chestnuts are worse," said another woman, producing the one that she had intercepted on its way towards her face. "When I am advancing a suffrageargument for the hundredth time, there is a nasty subtle significance about a chestnut."
The tax collector, happening to stroll in just then to buy a ticket for a meeting, kindly tendered us his sympathy. He had frequently to endure the same unfriendly treatment at the hands of children, he told us, when he visited their homes in his official capacity. This information did not meet with the response he evidently expected from us, and realizing that voteless women could not be reasonably expected to feel furiously hostile towards anybody who pelted a tax collector, he admitted a difference in the point of view and beat a tactful retreat, warning us as he went to refrain from attempting an open-air meeting in the criminal district.
"You won't do any good there," he assured us; "they are too stupid to understand, and they may make things very unpleasant for you."
This would have been true, perhaps, of an open-air meeting in a respectable neighbourhood, not to say of a drawing-room meeting anywhere. In a respectable, law-abiding district, it is always difficult and frequently dangerous to hold an open-air meeting. To begin with, you have to stand for some time without any audience at all, saying "We are the Suffragettes; we have come here to talk about votes for women," over and over again, with an ingratiating smile, to a policeman with a coldly detached air, and, perhaps, a young man on the opposite side of the road, who is longing to listen but dare not cross over for fear of being identified with lawless young women whose husbands andbabies languish untended in the theoretical home. Afterwards, when these preliminary efforts have successfully assembled an audience, it is generally one that is too stupid to understand, and it frequently makes things unpleasant for the speaker. All this may be confidently expected to happen in respectable neighbourhoods, where the standard of conduct is conventional enough to have brought unconventionality within the jurisdiction of lynch law.
In the black spot of our constituency, however, these familiar difficulties scarcely seemed to exist for the open-air speaker, least of all the preliminary difficulty of collecting an audience. The moment our wagon appeared, flying the tricolour flag that stood for no party cry and for no party candidate, the audience came in rushes from all the alleys and dens in the neighbourhood, and in less than two minutes one looked down upon a swaying mass of tattered and slatternly humanity that would have been horribly pathetic if for one moment it had been less than human. As it was, one merely realized that when the narrow barrier of circumstance that separates the fortunates from the unfortunates of this world has once been swept away, human points of contact are multiplied, not diminished.
The audience naturally gave the speaker in the lorry no time to make philosophic reflections.
"Don't look as though she'd been fed on skilly, do she?" was a sally that produced instant applause.
"Here, miss!" shouted a young hooligan, pushing into prominence a good-looking girl whose open,laughing face might have belonged to any child of twenty in any sheltered home. "She's been to 'Olloway; can she have a vote?"
"Not much!" roared the crowd.
Our militant member, distributing leaflets on the edge of the crowd, smiled on the girl as she went shuffling off. "I've been to prison myself," she said, by way of breaking the ice; "what can you have done at your age to get there?"
The girl threw back her head with another laugh. "Oh, a drop of beer and a few words with a copper!" was the easy reply.
After that, it was a simple matter to get into conversation, and other women, who were not laughing, gathered round to listen.
"You Suffragettes have made things in the 'jug' a lot better for us pore women," said one, more intelligent-looking than the rest. "They give us chiny mugs now, 'stead of them tins, and——"
"I 'ope as you'll git inter Parlyment, that I do!" chimed in another.
"Yuss! Good luck to you!" cried a chorus of voices.
They vented their new-found enthusiasm upon a bibulous gentleman, who was asserting with drowsy monotony that he didn't want women to have votes, not he! He wanted them to love, honour, and obey——
"Stow it!" they broke in impatiently. "Forgettin' your manners, ain't you?"
The woman in the lorry was telling them why shewent to prison, two months ago. She soon had her audience well in hand, human points of contact not being far to seek in a crowd to whom it was at least unnecessary to explain that women did not go to gaol for fun. A passer-by, who happened to drift there from the prosperous part of the constituency, stopped to make this hackneyed insinuation and was well hooted for his pains by a crowd that knew more than he did of the experiences described by the speaker. Even the drowsy sentimentalist, realizing, one might almost suppose, that his proper place was rather at a drawing-room meeting than at a street-corner one, went elsewhere in search of love and obedience; and the crowd of derelicts that remained, growing more numerous every minute, pressed closer and closer to the lorry till they swarmed up the wheels and over the sides and sat at the feet of the woman who had been where they had been, and suffered what they had suffered, for a cause they dimly began to understand because it appeared to be connected with prison and suffering. Even their primitive minds could receive an impression of the woman standing up above them, against the crude light of the street lamp, standing for something that was going to bring a little warmth and brilliance into a cold neutral world, the warmth and brilliance that they had somehow missed. Emphatically, these people were not of the stuff that melodrama and novelettes are made of. They had never discovered what is sensationally called the romance of crime, and there was nothing splendid or attractive in the offences that had sent them to gaol. Someday or another, in a dull past, they had exchanged the dinginess of unemployment for the ingloriousness of petty crime, that was all.
A woman, bedraggled and dishevelled, strayed across from the public-house and stood for a moment gazing vacantly up at the trim little figure of the woman in the cart. She was past listening to anything that might be said.
"Shameless!" she commented, and drifted away again, unheeded. The adjustment of standards was bewildering; and one felt that here was another interrupter whose mental attitude was that of the drawing-room and not of the street corner.
The speaker made an end and asked for questions. They did not come with any rapidity. People who have done with the conventions of conduct are not anxious to know what is to become of the baby and the washing of the housewife who wants to cast a vote at a Parliamentary election. There was a pause; then the speaker declared the meeting closed. The meeting, however, declined to be closed. The crowd stood motionless, waiting for more; and they had it, when a real electioneer, wearing party colours and bristling with party commonplaces, stepped up to the fringe of the audience. He brought a breath of prosperous unreality with him, and when his objection, the usual apprehensive one about future women members of Parliament, was aptly answered from the lorry, the habitués of the place broke into noisy exultation.
"Nipped 'im in the bud, she has! Give it 'im agin, miss; give it 'im 'ot!"
As it happened, she had to give it to him again and again, he being one of those hecklers who are never nipped in the bud, but think that if they ask the same question often enough they will catch the speaker unawares in the end. Unable to do this, after failing to accept or indeed to comprehend the answer that was patiently repeated four times, the ingenuous heckler wanted to know if the lady did not think he could sufficiently safeguard her interests in Parliament, and went away feeling sure he had the best of it, but wondering slightly why she laughed so immoderately at his parting shaft.
The wagon moved slowly off, and the meeting reluctantly broke up. The woman who had been speaking looked down upon her slowly dispersing audience, and tried to draw conclusions.
"One feels at home with these people," she said. "I wonder why it is?"
"Society has broken down their barriers, and they haven't learnt to set up new ones," suggested some one.
"'The saints and the sinners meet in the gaols,'" quoted our literary member, softly. "Suffragettes forced to be sinners, and sinners who are not given a chance to be saints—oh, it's easy to see why we two should be fellow-creatures!"
The saints and the sinners, slouching back to their dens, passed a similar verdict, if differently expressed, on the woman who had been speaking.
"Good old sport, that's whatIcall the old gal!" cried a young fellow, challenging criticism in a threatening tone.
"Same 'ere," returned the pretty girl-sinner, or saint, not laughing this time, as she looked after the flapping flag that had brought a streak of colour, for one hour of her turbulent existence, into the black spot of the constituency.
When our local committee determined, in the words of the minutes book, to open a shop and offices in the local main street, "for the dissemination of suffrage literature," we made up our minds that we would not be amateur shopkeepers. The success of our venture, we argued solemnly, depended on convincing the neighbourhood that we meant to be taken as seriously as any other tradesman in the street. Unfortunately, in saying this, we reckoned without our customer; for, if you attempt to be taken seriously as a shopkeeper, the one error to be avoided is that of taking the customer seriously.
Naturally, we began by taking the customer very seriously. The first one who entered the shop was instantly confronted with three eager shop assistants, who asked him breathlessly and in unison what they might have the pleasure of showing him. He replied politely that he had known perfectly well what they might have the pleasure of showing him, before they asked him what it was, but that their unbroken front and commercial zeal had entirely put it out of his head. Two of us thereupon beat a wise retreatand left the field to the militant member of our committee, who promptly told our first customer that she was sure he wanted a suffrage tie in the colours. He agreed to this, dubiously at first, afterwards with real alacrity when she offered him the alternative of a tobacco-pouch, prettily decorated with a hand-painted sketch of Holloway Gaol, done from memory.
"I never smoke a pipe," he explained, excusing himself for his firmness over the tobacco-pouch; "but I can wear the tie, perhaps, when I call on people who won't allow me to talk about votes for women."
"This tie will speak for itself," said the shop assistant.
"It will," agreed her customer with a warmth that seemed to us excessive, until we perceived that the tie was oozing forth in all directions from the insufficient piece of paper in which it was being wrapped up.
After the departure of our first customer, we reconsidered the position. It was evident that as shopkeepers we started with a distinct handicap, being ourselves amateurs in selling, whereas no customer is ever an amateur in buying. A woman may never have entered a suffrage shop in order to buy an instructive pamphlet, but most women know how to pass a pleasant half-hour in a hat shop without buying anything. We must be on our guard, we decided, against the customer who came, not to buy, but to shop, the opportunities open to the customer for falling short of the shopkeeper's ideal of her being greatly multiplied when the shop atwhich she shops is one for the dissemination of suffrage literature and not for the display of spring millinery. Also, on the initiative of the militant member of our committee, it was resolved that only one person at a time should serve any one customer, and that if a second customer should enter while everybody was still hunting for the pamphlet the first customer wanted to buy, somebody should call "Shop!" in a professional tone up the spiral staircase, in order to disabuse the minds of both customers of the notion that we were new at our work. We found, on carrying this last precept into practice, that it had a marked effect on the waiting customer, though very little on the mythical resources of the spiral staircase.
Having settled down to wait for the customers who were going to make our shop a thriving business, we found that the majority of them belonged to those who went out to shop and not to buy. Numbers of them, indeed, seemed to be there on the assumption that if you want to buy something, one shop is as good as another in which to seek it. A good deal of useful experience is probably gained in this way by the one who shops; but when you are the shopkeeper, you wish it could be gained at somebody else's expense. We felt this very strongly the day that our door was burst abruptly open by a ragged, unkempt gentleman who wanted a soup ticket.
The childlike confidence of this particular gentleman in the ability of the Suffragettes to supply his wants, was at once pathetic and complimentary;but the pathos of it did not reveal itself to the haughty, disapproving lady who was already in the shop, giving advice to us all. She left at once, clearly convinced that really good unsought advice was wasted on people who kept such low company, an opinion that would have been startlingly confirmed had she waited long enough to see the ticket-of-leave man.
The ticket-of-leave man came in to ask if we could give him a job. Obviously, he belonged to the great army of those who can do "anything"; we had no job to give, and told him so—a little curtly, I am afraid, as a consequence of many previous interruptions from those who did not come to buy. He stood a moment, fumbling at the latch of the door without raising it; then he turned round again.
"Don't send me away, lady," he pleaded. "I've been to prison too, same as all of you."
The woman who alone among us answered to this generic description of a mild and blameless local committee, came swiftly forward.
"I'm sorry," she said. "What can we do for you, and what made you come to us?"
The man jerked his hand towards the corner of the street where a policeman stood on the point. "Said he couldn't help me himself," was the reply. "Oh, he spoke kind enough, I'm not complaining of the coppers——"
"No, of course not," agreed our militant member. "He's especially nice, that one. He's the one that arrested me in Parliament Square."
Another customer, who was making a genuinepurchase, was struck speechless by this calm announcement on the part of an amiable-looking shop assistant; but the ticket-of-leave man went on with his tale unemotionally.
"He said to me—'You go to the Suffragettes yonder,' he said; 'they'll help you if anyone can,' he said. So I came in on the chance like."
We were rather sorry that our friend on the point sent us no more ticket-of-leave men to vary the monotony of business life and to add to the circle of acquaintance of our militant member. She, however, always maintained that it was an error of judgment, if not of taste, on our part, to present the policeman who had once arrested her with the hand-painted tobacco-pouch, though she admitted that he might use it for the rest of his life without discovering what the sketch of Holloway Gaol was meant for.
The customer who was most destructive of our peace was the kind of amiable person who, having completed an infinitesimal purchase, stayed to chat, monopolizing the one shop chair and barricading a diminutive counter against anybody else who might really want to buy something. We greatly preferred the flippant jester who, attracted by our ingenuous notice inviting people to come in and ask for what they did not see in the window, would sometimes put his head in at the door to ask facetiously for a vote; but we were rather glad that the humorist of the street was, as a rule, too short to reach the latch, and had to satisfy his sense of humour by assuming that the name of every woman in the shop,not excluding the charwoman, was Pankhurst, a quip that afforded exquisite joy to the little crowd that loved to hang round our doorway, besides advertising the object of our shop very nicely. Sometimes, the limitations of the street repertoire became a little tiresome. Admitting that the phrase "Votes for Women" could not be said seriously too often in a reactionary world, we felt that it was out of place when hurled as an original remark through the letter-box by somebody who instantly ran away. This method of backing a belief in any cause, though practised in high places, might well be eradicated, we thought, in very small and very elementary school children before it was too late; so we caught one of them, a little girl staggering under the burden of a large baby, and made her listen to reason. She was extremely friendly about it, said she didn't see but what we were right, even if we did smack policemen's faces, and kindly promised to come and have a look round, as soon as her little sister was free to take over the responsibility of the baby.
It became increasingly difficult to sustain our professional pose as the shop grew more popular, because kindly old ladies insisted on coming in to ask if we took our meals regularly, and to beg us not to fall down the spiral staircase, which looked perilous, I suppose, to any one who saw us for the first time steering a tea-tray down its ramifications, but always seemed to us pleasantly emblematic of our mounting aspirations. Curiously enough, it was on the day the shop was photographed that we finally won our way to the respect of the trade, though at the timenothing in our business experience had made us feel so much like children playing at shop.
Everything in the neighbourhood under the age of twelve rushed helter-skelter to the spot. As fast as the photographer swept them to one side of the pavement, they closed up on the other; and only his experienced agility and a lightning camera enabled him to procure a picture that did not resemble an advertisement of the Children's Holiday Fund. All this was in the nature of a Roman holiday for the neighbourhood, but we, summoned to the doorstep to form part of the picture, felt it was to be counted among the lesser sacrifices that have to be made for a cause. The bystanders, of course, did not take this view of our behaviour.
"Look at 'em," said one of these, just as we were miserably submitting to being grouped in self-conscious, affectionate attitudes that did not remotely convey the business-like relations of a business-like committee. "That's what they like! Votes for women, indeed!"
Fixed by the glassy eye of the camera, we were unable to reply to this; so our scornful critic went away, doubtless confirmed in his belief that there is no higher reward for a rebel woman than that of standing in a thin blouse, at a street corner, to be photographed, blown about by a cutting east wind, jostled by yelling children, and exposed to the chance of recognition at any minute by some disapproving friend or relative.
"Nobody will ever look upon us as real people in business, after that," sighed one of our shop assistantswhen we regained comparative privacy behind the counter.
"Nobody," acquiesced our militant member, gloomily. "And only this morning, I was really feeling like a genuine tradesman when I took down the shutters and agreed with the man next door that trade will never improve as long as this Government is in power."
"Our trade certainly won't," agreed a chorus of anti-Government agitators.
The door was suddenly flung open, and a boy came in and flung a sovereign on the counter.
"Could you oblige Mr. Bunting with change, please, miss?" he asked briskly.
That was all. There was no condescension in his tone. There was no impudence in his manner. He did not ask if we wanted our rights now, or if we would sooner wait till we got them. He did not say he had no wish to see women sitting inhisParliament. He just stood there, as shopman to shopman, waiting to effect a trade transaction that raised us, once and for all, beyond the level of amateurs.
Nothing approaching a sovereign's worth of change was in the chocolate-box hopefully described by us as the till; but our militant member, now as ever, knew how to rise to a great occasion. She looked up from the column of figures she had hastily pretended to be adding up when the shop bell tinkled, seemed to take in the boy's request with difficulty, called "Forward, dear, please!" in a languid tone up the spiral staircase, then returned to the column of figures. No lady of business experiencein any shop or any post office could have been more exasperatingly irrelevant.
The rest of us looked fearfully at the boy in front of the counter. He was kicking his heels together and whistling tunelessly. Her procedure had, indeed, not erred in a single detail; and he saw nothing aggressive in her behaviour. Henceforth we knew we could count on being treated in the trade as equals.